Before everything, I must mention that I
don’t despise all self-help theories. Sometimes they are really helpful, giving
you the courage to break through a hardship. If someone is willing to find a motivation
to change one’s life in these pep talks I’m not against it. Yes, this is a
disclaimer.
As we have seen in Alain de Botton’s
philosophy themed clips, existentialism is often interpreted as some kind of a
self-help theory.
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| Why, it all sums up bluntly to YOLO… |
A motivation to act,
not for someone other than me, we are free, don’t settle for the status quo…
blah blah blah. While this sounds quite like our favorite existentialists, we should
know better!
As post-modernist philosophers have
discussed in length, we live in a world where one’s path of life is greatly
dependent on the society one lives in. The philosophical debate between agent
and structure goes on and on, but let’s say that the reality lies somewhere
between those two extremes. Why I generally sneer at the self-help industry is
that they tend make an illusion rather than encouraging people to face the
reality. These gurus are usually rare exceptions, who once hit the bottom of
their life but miraculously, by the sheer force of their will, changed themselves
and now enjoy a successful life. They urge their customers to do the same,
disregarding how much luck and untold elements made it possible for him or her.
They never admit that not everyone are beginning on the same starting point. They
make people blame themselves for the problem in their lives, saying that if one
hasn’t succeeded then one hasn’t tried hard enough. They urge us to defy
gravity, even if it means, in case of a failure, falling flat on the face.
Self-help gurus reduce everything into a personal
issue. According to them blaming one’s surrounding will never result in
anything productive. We should accept what’s given and try our best from there,
and if we don’t succeed, it’s due to our lack of effort. They naturally set a
very personal goal, something that can be attained by controlling oneself.
While
existentialists might agree that one shouldn’t choose to stay in Bad Faith,
they tend to urge us to act for greater social justice, because the sole rule
of action is to act as if we’re laying the course for the entire Human Being. Sartre,
Beauvoir and Camus are all known to be activists, corresponding to their own
theories. To someone who can’t afford the medical bills, a self-help guru will
advise to shape up one’s career and find a job that comes with a good
insurance, but an existentialist will rather fight with this person to
guarantee medical accessibility to the poor too. Self-help addict will always
try to keep feeling good for himself; to an existentialist the way you choose
to live can sometimes contradict your own interest or cause great discomfort,
but that’s what it means to be condemned to be free.
Moreover, existentialist insights are based
on the proposition that existence precedes essence. For them there is no inherent
value for existence, no reason to exist. Hence the absurdity of life and death.
They each found a different way to deal with this cold, harsh truth. Sartre
turned the tables and thought it was rather good that we don’t have a
predetermined way to live, and that we have to fight every second to set our
own values, and Camus set a counter fire with even more absurdity, finding a
stage of victory ‘as the rock tumbles down to the foot of the mountain for Sisyphus’.
Either way, they always counter the fate with full awareness, and every
philosophy derives from it.
For self-help lecturers, facing the truth
of death would also stimulate one’s appetite for life. However, they don’t
think life is as absurd as the death. On the contrary they tend to think life is
more precious because of it, as one who experiences cold weather on the porch
will be more thankful for the warmth inside. The fact that everyone finally must
go back to cold might hang on the verge of their consciousness, but they think
it won’t happen to them, or pursuing life to its fullness will defy the fate.
Finally, on a minor note, self-help gurus
are arrogant hypocrites. Their success is built on their customers who are
desperate to find a way out. However they offer nothing but reprimand and false
hope in return, treating his followers like imbeciles. A good existentialist
will not judge you, she or he will only guide you to see the reality eyes wide
open, and let you test your own justifications from the old life.
Hello Haeon !
ReplyDeleteI find your post very interesting and I share your contempt for “self-help gurus” as you say. I believe that most of them are hypocrites who just try to make money on the from naive or lost people.
However, surprisingly your description of their methods remind me of stoïcism. This philosophy is also centered on the individual. You have to try to find happiness, or at least tranquillity, lack of sufferance, within yourself. You have to understand what depends on you and what escapes your power. It is on the first category that you can work to find happiness. And there just as you said “blaming one’s surrounding will never result in anything productive”.
So what do you think of stoïcism ?
Moreover, I don’t really know about self-help theories but in stoïcism there is a “philosophy of action”, if I may say. There is this idea that you have to work for the city and the collective life. So quite indirectly you can work on your surrounding (without making your happiness depend on it). Couldn’t we find something like that in self-help ? A try to act on the world but linked to the idea that it escapes your control and thus shouldn’t affect you ?
These are the thoughts that occur me while I was reading your post, I just wanted to share :)
Great topic. My personal thoughts:
ReplyDeleteCouldn’t agree more with you on what you said about the self-help industry often providing issues to problems without tackling the actual sources of problems. By oversimplifying situations and asserting issues are rooted in different causes than they actually are, in my opinion this hardly ever leads to a desired outcome (for the self help consumer). Even though this is maybe not always intended in this way by these (self proclaimed) self help guru’s.
You also put this forward by saying the self help industry creates an illusion rather than facing reality. I think in some cases self help also can be described as a sort of placebo. Ultimately, the goal of a self help book, video, course or whatever else, is to make money. Providing a brief, "feel good" solution, which might work temporarily, is all fine and dandy, but at the end of the day the goal and incentive of the producer is to make a big fat stack of money, a.k.a. profit.
I also think it makes people feel entitled to be happy and therefore IMO the likelihood of creating false expectations is very high and again is not to the benefit of the self help consumer. Moreover, in the self help I have read, which to be fair is not a lot, usually very little scientific basis is given.
I’m sure there is a lot of wisdom in some of the self help out there, but I feel that it’s overshadowed by self help being intrinsically profit based. Why read a self-help book if it doesn’t actually make you feel good?
Interesting post, which to me begs the question: whether it is possible to see existentialism as a form of self-help? Now this obviously requires a denunciation of the apparent negative associations and connotations that the word self-help carries. But what is existentialism, if it is not a way of trying to help the self to become fully aware and conscious of what it means to be a self (a self that exists)? For Sartre the self is condemned to freedom and as existence precedes essence, the self must always create itself, rather than being disillusioned by bad faith or in a search for its essence. Is this not a way of helping the self, and therefore an existentialist type of self-help?
ReplyDeleteHey there,
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading your post, and I too have often thought about the connection between self-help products and existentialism (after all, both tackle the issue of the absurdity of our existence!). You lament about how lots of self-help books come from the author's own experience, which they use to project into their readers as some kind of one-size-fits-all strategy for coping with our lives, and I agree with you that this is clearly unrealistic. However I have to admit that while reading existentialist philosophy and the remedies given for how to best live our lives, I can't help but have the same kind of doubts as to whether this one individual's ideas can really be applied universally. For example, when Camus says the best way to combat absurdity is to live every single moment accepting our death and asserting our existence in spite of it, I think about all the different people and cultures in the world, and I wonder how he can say that this kind of mindset will work for everyone to and the same end result. While I don't think that existentialism is all about telling people what to do to cope with their lives, I think when faced with an existential crisis, perhaps people are best off turning to a family member or a therapist so they can deal with their issues from the basis of their own individual situation and experiences.